I, Victoria

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  As we appeared in the gateway the vast organ, together with two hundred musicians and a choir of six hundred voices, burst into the National Anthem, but nothing more than the first few notes were heard, for they were drowned out by the great cheer which rose from the multitude assembled there as though in their joy they had but one voice. There they were before me, bank upon bank of pink faces under tall hats and silk bonnets, and every face shining with delight and love and goodness, shouting out the joy of their celebration – shouting for me, yes, but more than that for themselves, for the glory that was England, her achievement, the peace and prosperity with which she nurtured her children, and her place at the heart of everything that was good and noble and liberating in the world. The experience of being there was so magical, so glorious, so touching that one felt – and everyone I spoke to afterwards agreed – filled most of all with devotion, more so than at any church service I have ever attended. It was a Festival of Peace, uniting the industry of all the nations of the earth, and there at the heart of it was its author, my beloved husband, my dearest Albert, whose soaring vision and selfless labour had brought it all into being.

  As the noise died away, Albert left my side and stepped down from the dais to place himself at the head of the commissioners and read aloud the report, putting his vision into clear and simple words, invoking God’s blessing on the work, on the people, and on my reign. When he had done I replied in a few words, hearing my own voice lift small but clear through those airy spaces, and at that moment I truly felt my great and dear country stretching away from me in all directions, as though I were at the centre of a vast intangible sphere. I felt my people’s love curve about me like the petals around the heart of a rose; for the heart of the rose is those petals – take them away, one by one, and there is nothing more. It was a moment of great reverence and mystery.

  When I had spoken, the Archbishop pronounced his prayer of thanksgiving and then – I might have expected it – the organ, choirs, musicians, two military bands and nine State Trumpeters burst into that infernal Hallelujah Chorus! I cast such a look at Albert, but his in reply was limpid with innocence. Under cover of the noise we began to form our procession for walking round the exhibits – the commissioners, the foreign representatives, the ministers, the Household officers – and here a curious thing happened. A Chinaman in gorgeous silk robes had been moving about amongst the dignitaries – I saw him shaking hands with the Duke and Anglesey (who were standing together) and made a mental note to ask Albert who he was, for I knew China had sent no official representative. A moment later the Mandarin thrust through the crowd and flung himself at my feet in a deep obeisance. It caused a great deal of consternation, for no-one knew quite what to do about him. It was all very irregular, but on the other hand, one did not want to offend China, even if it had broken all the diplomatic rules. Concealing my annoyance, I smiled at the man, and spoke a few words to the Lord Chamberlain, telling him to find a place for him in the procession. The Mandarin was put in behind the foreign diplomats, beside the Duke. The Duke managed however to slip back, and by offering his arm to Lord Anglesey (who was lame, of course, having lost a leg at Waterloo) was able to dissociate himself politely from the unknown. The sight of those two old rivals (Anglesey in his wicked youth had eloped with the Duke’s sister) in such friendly converse raised a great cheer from the spectators.

  We took our places behind the officers of State and started our walk about the exhibition. I walked beside my darling Albert, who was calm and modest as always, surveying the fruit of all his vast labour as though it had been nothing to do with him. He held Vicky’s hand, Bertie walked with me, and both were very excited and impressed with everything they saw – and how could they not be? We took only a brief tour that opening day, but the impression of it on my imagination remains to this day: a fabulous sight, brilliant, scintillating, such as the world had never seen before and has never seen again; the sunlight pouring in through the transparent spaces above and all around, the rich warmth of the hangings, carpets and tapestries, the palms, the flowers, the pellucid, rainbow colours, the music and voices and soft plashing of the fountain in its wide crystal basin; and above all, the sense of wonder, gratitude and love I felt from my people all around me. That day I walked, though a feeble woman, unguarded and unafraid amidst a multitude: no soldiers, no bodyguard, not even a policeman in sight – and what other ruler of what other country in the world could have done the same?

  We returned finally to the dais where I gave the word to Lord Breadalbane to pronounce the exhibition open, which he did in a ringing voice, to be followed by a fanfare of trumpets and a one-hundred-gun salute outside in the Park, which raised a tremendous cheer. I think everyone in our party shed a few tears at that point. Then we drove back to Buckingham Palace, through the most colossal crowds, all wildly enthusiastic but keeping perfect order, which was the hallmark of the day. We arrived at twenty past one. As soon as we were through the gates the troops lining the road to keep it clear let the people through, and in a moment The Mall was packed from side to side with a vast throng, all looking towards the Palace as if hoping for something more. It was at Albert’s suggestion that we went out on to the balcony in the middle of the main facade and showed ourselves, and it proved to be a very good idea and very well received. We waved to the people, and they cheered and cheered, and I think would gladly have gone on cheering all day if we had stayed there to be cheered at. (Since then we have made it a custom to appear on the balcony on great State occasions, and I very much hope that it will be continued. Love needs the means and opportunity of expressing itself, and our love for each other, Crown and People, is at the heart of everything good in this land.)

  Later that day Granville sent us a message about the mysterious Chinaman. He was not a representative of the Imperial Government at all, but the proprietor of a Chinese Junk which was moored at the Temple pier and which he showed people over at a shilling a time. Since all the papers mentioned the affair, it proved excellent advertisement for him, and ensured him a profitable season. I laughed very much about it afterwards, and Albert said that since the Great Exhibition was intended to be a celebration of Free Trade and Commercial Enterprise, the Chinaman’s actions were very much in the spirit of the thing, and he ought to be taken up as its mascot!

  3rd October 1900

  ONE EXHIBIT which properly belonged to the Great Exhibition was not displayed within the Crystal Palace. This was the Model Lodging House, which Albert, as President of the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Labouring Classes, had designed himself as an example of rational, decent and economical housing for the lower orders. After long wrangling with Horseguards and the abominable Woods and Forests, he had obtained permission to erect it on a piece of waste ground next to the barracks, which he had done entirely at his own expense. It was a wonderful thing, four dwellings arranged on two floors, each storey identical so that further storeys could be added if desired. There was a central, open staircase connecting them, and the whole was built of patent, hollow bricks, with brick arches supporting the floors and roof instead of timbers, reducing the fire risk. (Fire was always a great hazard in ‘slum’ areas.) Each dwelling had a living-room, three bedrooms, and a scullery fitted out complete with sink, coal bin, plate rack, meat safe, et cetera. A dust shaft for refuse led to an enclosed repository under the stairs, and each apartment had a water-closet with modern Staffordshire glazed furniture, so that the families could live in a wholesome and hygienic atmosphere.

  At the end of the exhibition the Model Lodging House was transferred to the edge of Kennington Park (the Duchy of Cornwall owns most of Kennington) where it remains to this day. Sadly Albert was unable to persuade any capitalist to invest in building such houses for the working classes; and the working classes themselves proved equally suspicious of the innovation, and seemed positively to relish the lack of hygiene in which they normally lived. Men are so narrow-minded that Albert’s great desire for Rational Housing fo
r the labouring sort is still unrealised, despite the awful death-rate from fever and disease amongst these people.

  Albert had decided that it was right to offer refreshments at the exhibition (many people would stay there for the whole day, since there was so much to see, and some of them would be coming from a very great distance), but that there should be no alcohol on sale (which he felt would strike the wrong note) and no hot food except potatoes. This latter rule was partly because of the danger of fire (the potatoes could be cooked safely in the steam provided for working the moving machinery in the Machine Courts) and partly because of the nuisance to other visitors of the smell of hot meats and onions and so on. But there was an elegant supply of sandwiches, patties, cold meats, pastries, fruit and cakes on sale, together with Seltzer water and hot and cold beverages. Messrs Schweppe paid the commissioners £5,500 for the contract to provide refreshments, and a good bargain it proved to be, for they took over £75,000 in all. The quantities they sold over the course of the exhibition were astonishing – a million Bath buns, for instance, thirty-three tons of ham, and eight thousand gallons of cream. In two of the refreshment courts humbler fare was also provided for the poorer sort, in the form of cocoa, spruce beer, bread and butter and cheese: Albert wanted to be sure everyone was catered for. And of course outside in the park and on the streets there was no limit to what could be bought from itinerant vendors, from sausages and hot pies to coconuts and oranges.

  The exhibition was, by every possible criterion, a remarkable success, and all those who had fought my darling so long and hard to oppose it were utterly confounded. People came from the furthest reaches of the country to visit it. Mill-masters got up excursion trains for their employees, rectors char-a-bancs for their parishioners; villagers clubbed together and drew lots for who should go; artisans and yeomen brought their wives and children, some of them leaving their home town or village for the first time in their lives. An agricultural implement maker sent his people round by water in two hired vessels which tied up at a wharf in Westminster. One woman walked on her own two feet all the way from Plymouth to see the exhibition; and London residents were besieged by relatives they had never heard of and friends from their childhood long forgotten, all eager to visit London that summer of all times. Everyone came, and no-one was disappointed; those who could came again and again. I myself paid something like forty visits, and delighted in showing a succession of our guests my favourite exhibits; I even paid for my head ghillie (not dear Brown in those days, of course, but Grant) to come down from Balmoral to see over it.

  And the Duke, who had been so sceptical of the affair, and so afraid of public disorder, grew remarkably attached to the Crystal Palace and visited it several times. On the last of these visits, four days before the closing, he went quite alone, in spite of warnings, to take a fond farewell of his favourite items. It was a very crowded day, and the small, silver-headed, frail old hero walked up the nave amid a throng of almost a hundred thousand souls, and was inevitably recognised and mobbed by enthusiastic admirers, all wanting to touch him or shake his hand. Those out of sight in other parts of the building heard the uproar and thought it betokened some disaster (perhaps the collapse which Colonel Sibthorpe had been predicting with increasing wistfulness as the season progressed). A panic ensued as thousands ran for the exits, and a large display of French chinaware was overset. The Duke was captured by six constables who had been following him without his knowledge, and he was removed, pale and indignant, almost bodily from the scene.

  But when I tell you that in the five and a half months of the exhibition that was the only untoward occurrence, you will have an idea of what a peaceful, orderly celebration it was. More than six million people passed through the entrances to the Crystal Palace that summer; on opening day there was a crowd of half a million surrounding the building; and at all times London was crammed with people of every degree from all over the country and all over the world. Yet in all that time there was no major crime committed in or around the exhibition. Crimes in general over the whole of London were fewer in number than in other years; and Richard Mayne’s specially enlarged police force had nothing to do in the environs of the Crystal Palace but to take up a handful of people for pick-pocketing and selling forged tickets. What a nation this is!

  And when everyone had been paid at the end of it all, the exhibition was found to have made a vast profit of £186,000. At Albert’s instigation the commissioners used it to purchase some eighty acres of land south of the Kensington Road. Here they planned to build museums, gardens and institutes dedicated to Art and Science and the furtherance of knowledge. On the site now, of course, are the Horticultural Gardens, the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Albert Hall, and a jumble of buildings known as the South Kensington Museum. Only last year I laid the foundation stone of a new building to house the collections of the latter, which when it is finished will be called the Victoria and Albert Museum, and will be dedicated to the fine and applied arts of all countries, with entrance free to all degrees of people. It will all be as my darling wanted it.

  As to Paxton’s glasshouse itself, the country had grown so fond of it that it did not want to part with it, and a motion was speedily put before Parliament to purchase it for the nation and turn it into a permanent Winter Garden. The commissioners were pledged, however, to return the Hyde Park site to the Woods and Forests in the condition in which they had found it; and so in the spring of 1852 the great conservatory was dismantled and transported across London to be re-erected in Sydenham, where its sobriquet of the Crystal Palace became its official and permanent name; and I’m told it is still a great attraction.

  5th October 1900

  WHEN IT was all over, we came up here to Scotland. I had never seen Albert so tired. The work and worry and conflict of the exhibition had worn him to a shadow, and for months he had been sleeping badly, getting up in the night and going to his desk to sit and read, and then returning to lie heavily in my arms for an hour or two before his usual hour of rising drove him away from me again. He had been suffering, too, from violent headaches, intermittent toothache, and stomach and bowel upsets, all of which are grievous troubles to a man with so much business to get through. On the evening of our arrival at Balmoral I found him sitting alone in his dressing-room, crying in an exhausted way which quite frightened me. I could do nothing but put my arms round his shoulders, upon which he turned and seized me clumsily, pressed his face against my belly and wept like a weary child.

  But Scotland revived him; the silence and the emptiness of the landscape seemed to fill his spirit as the cold, clean air filled his lungs. When one day we found ourselves on top of an eminence with nothing in view but wild mountains, lochs and heather – no buildings, no people, no symptoms of habitation of any sort – he seemed to find his peace, and I saw his eyes brighten, and his shoulders straighten like a blade of grass that has been pressed down and is now released.

  ‘It is so wonderful here,’ he sighed. ‘It is just like home!’ And by home he meant, of course, not Buckingham Palace or Windsor or even dear Osborne, but the Rosenau. He said the mountains around Balmoral were just like the wooded Thuringian hills of his childhood. Now, I have been to Coburg, and stayed in the Rosenau – slept in the very room Albert and Ernst shared as boys – and I know there is not the least likeness; but I understood, though in a way I could not put into words, what his heart was saying to him. It was all part of a process which had been going on all his life, and which I came to understand only too late – the process of running away.

  He had said to me once, ‘It is not you I would leave; there is nowhere I ever want to be except in your arms,’ and I had taken it for reassurance – indeed, there was nothing else I could do. But I came to see that there was a core of him which did not belong to the earth, which was not attached, and struggled always to get away, tugging at him as a kite flown high in a good breeze tugs at your hand. It is fun, when flying a kite, to feel that tug,
exhilarating to be connected even if only by a string to something that moves to a stronger wind than that which stirs our earth-bound bodies. But for Albert it must have been exhausting to go on resisting. His soul rippled and dragged in a strong, pure wind none of us understood or even knew about; and how often he must have longed simply to let go of the earth and go sailing away, free at last of pains and trials, to soar into the clear, clean place where he knew he would find his Maker’s shining face and loving, soothing hands.

  But duty made him stay – hard, heavy, leaden duty. And so he worked, and worked, and waited for release; remained always patient, always diligent, always cheerful (for he believed, as I do, that God loves those who do His work with a glad and willing heart). The tug upon the string manifested itself only in these vain attempts to run away – first to Osborne, then to Balmoral, and then just further and further into the merciful anodyne of work. But it wore him out, of course, the conflict between body and soul. The only peace he had was in my arms, in the certainty of my love for him, and in the release of passion, that strange release he half-feared, but which he never ceased to crave.

  He was a man who found it difficult to express affection, and so the loss in quick succession of the two men he regarded as his friends – Anson and Peel – had been grievous for him. Anson was like a younger brother, the only man I ever saw Albert touch spontaneously, though it was only a casual arm across the shoulder, and on a rare occasion. Peel he had liked and trusted, and he had felt – which was more important – that Peel understood him and approved of him. He had lost them both while still struggling with the exhibition; and to those losses had been added two more – not in death, but in the going away of two people he had admired and enjoyed the company of. One was our dear Laddle, who retired in January 1851, feeling that the nursery needed a younger supervisor; and the other was Thomas Cubitt, who finished his work at Osborne, packed his plans, and went away to other schemes.